Screenwriting Self-Help

A week in LA at the Los Angeles Screenwriter’s conference and expo was always bound to be a fascinating experience on a whole range of levels. And predictably the range spanned from the sublime to the ridiculous.

What struck me as particularly fascinating (bordering on the hilarious) as I perused the presentations and trade show was the broad culture of ‘justification’.

LA is a city drowning in screenwriters - stop any given person, of any demographic, in any given LA suburb and ask ‘how their screenplay is comin’? and you’re all but guaranteed to get a legitimate response.

Now truth be acknowledged, writing a feature screenplay is hard, really hard. And that’s well before you begin to factor in the seemingly random ‘leaf in the wind’ personality shifts of producers and studios as to what it is they’re looking for. Writing the screenplay is really hard and selling it is excruciating. Consummate ability and masses of hard work are required and yet still no guarantee of anything.

And yet despite this unwavering truth the grand screenwriting populous of LA is undeterred - soldiering on with unabashed enthusiasm for the ‘Pitch’ and the ‘Treatment’ and the ‘Script’.

Sadly, if we can be permitted to stand as devil’s advocate for a few moments, the reality is that the avalanche bulk majority of those identifying as ‘screenwriters’ and seeking to sell their first script have no ability at all and no story worth telling. The flesh is willing but the talent is weak. What seemingly compounds this problem, observed at this most recent conference and expo, is the apparent constant pursuit Not of the ‘good story well told’ but of what ‘the studios want?’, ‘what the market wants?’.

The moment screenwriting becomes about filling a particular and definable hole, the defining of a missing piece, it fails. It becomes about an Answer not a Question, an End Result rather than a Explorative Journey. What becomes apparent in strolling the trade show floor and the presentation rooms of such a conference is that the pursuit of the formula, the system, the pattern, the method has superseded the pursuit of the story itself.

What results from this is a cultural industry of ‘justification’; a myriad of solutions, courses, systems and self-help programs for would-be screenwriters to justify to themselves why it is they are not yet successful.

The broadly palpable assumption by implication therefore is that its not a lack of ability or absence of a good story that is the problem but simply that the right system hasn’t been engaged. A peculiar cultural perspective that “it can’t be the writing, it can’t be the idea, it can’t be the lack of knowledge or education or experience, No… It must be that I’m not using the right System/Method/Process…”

Subsequently the number of screenwriters at such an expo is seemingly matched only by the array of ‘quick fix’ solutions to writing ‘screenplays that sell’. Its a bit like a ‘10 minute abs’ fitness program with each subsequent competitor aiming to reduce the number of minutes required to attain the much desired ‘abs’. 6min abs, 4min abs, 1min abs….

Despite the surface level diversity each system on sale makes effectively the same promise - maximum success with minimum outlay in either time or money.

This ‘culture of justification’, that perpetually seeks to justify why success has not yet been had in commodity-based distilled parameters, is one that seems to draw directly on a distinctly American-Capitalist culture of perceived success.

Philosopher Alain de Boton in his work ‘Status Anxiety’ looks at the cultural predicament of the economic poor in contemporary America and the particular social perception of shame that is often applied to the poor in purely capitalist societies. American social culture is one built on possibility - that anyone can rise to the top, that anyone can be President, that anyone can start with nothing and achieve anything. Whilst nice in theory this cultural perspective, according to Botton, also leads to a perception that to be poor is to have failed the American Dream, to be letting down the team by not keeping up with the broad cultural ambition of ‘success’. To not Succeed is to Fail and failure is scorned.



This idea applied to the great screenwriting mass that drenches Los Angeles results in a set of problematic perspectives; first that Screenwriting is something anyone with half an idea can do. Second that because everyone can do it the fact that a person can’t sell a screenplay means not that the screenplay is no good but rather that it isn’t following the right formula/system/process for success. And third that not achieving success means that one has let down the team, failing to live up to the great Hollywood dream.

The result is the culture of justification that coerces would-be screenwriters to move from system to system, process to process, seminar to workshop to quick fix in the perpetual pursuit of the missing element to the desired success.

And directly from this stems the industry of justification solutions - a seemingly endless litany of books, dvds, manuals, seminars, workshops and presentations all geared towards maximum success for minimal effort; the pursuit of the reasons why a person is not yet successful in a culture that demands that you should be.

What bothers me most about this is certainly not broad engagement with a creative pursuits. Any culture that embraces creative endeavors at a popular level, irrespective of abstracted perceptions of ‘quality’, is most certainly a healthy one. A populous that en masse feels that creativity is open to them is a culture that will thrive and provide a far greater scope for the Mozarts and Picassos to rise to the top.

Rather, my concern stems from the warping and distortion of a sense of a ‘Creative Culture’ into a Culture in pursuit of ‘Success’ as a Right rather than Reward; as a Goal rather than an Outcome. This distortion of creative pursuits leads to a profound disrespect for Education, for Knowledge, for Craft and Ability.

I simply lost track of the book, dvd and seminar titles, along with their associated blurbs, built on the direct idea that you don’t need Film School, don’t need Experience, don’t need to devote years of Study and Work to be a successful screenwriter; that all of that can be distilled down into a bight-size chunk of system/process/formula available to you at a ‘special introductory price…!’

- ‘Writing the Killer Treatment: Selling Your Story Without A Script’
- ‘The Screenwriting Formula ‘
- ‘500 Ways To Beat The Hollywood Script Reader’
- ‘Cool Million: How to Become a Million-Dollar Screenwriter ‘
- ‘Doing It for Money: The Agony and Ecstasy of Writing and Surviving in Hollywood’
- ‘How To Write A Movie in 21 Days: The Inner Movie Method’
- ‘Write Screenplays That Sell: The Ackerman Way’

And for the ultimate in compression film education there’s always the maniacal Dov S S Siemens -



Now of course any and all of the above can be dismissed in an instant if we invoke a lowest common denominator perspective. Long is the list of mindless cinematic rubbish churned out by Hollywood on a near daily basis and plenty are the writers whose screenwritten drivel grew from such books as above and made it into commercially successful movies.

There is no argument here if lowest common denominator is the goal. But what struck me as strange was that the numerous aspiring screenwriters I spoke to at the Screenwriters Expo, whilst hoping for commercial success, were none the less aiming at the lofty heights of the screenplay greats. Amid the Hollywood chaff there is little doubt too of Hollywood brilliance and its here that the great many would be screenwriters aim. Not at the disposable pap but at the lasting testaments of cinematic greatness. And yet here lies the irony driven by a perspective that success and greatness is Owed not Earned and that attainment of that goal is about finding the correct shaped block to fit into the right shaped hole.



Of course the book/dvd/seminar stands of Screenwriters Expo wasn’t all of one shade and one book in particular grabbed my attention and enthralled me through the long flight back to Sydney. Howard Suber’s ‘The Power of Film’ is a book that dispenses with the formulaic bullshit and succinctly and directly tackles the heart and guts of cathartic narrative engagement. The structure of the book is incredibly simple, its effectively a glossary, an A-Z of key words, terms, ideas accompanied by a short essay. From Anti-Heroes through Pity, Power and Vulnerability, Suber explores the terms, concepts and ideas that fuel narrative and audience engagement. No formulas, no methods, no systems; just clear and impassioned engagement with the pillars of story and human experience. Its an extraordinary book that can teach more about cinematic narrative than any re-hashed bastardization of Aristotle’s poetics. Indeed, Suber’s book may have much more in common with Aristotle than any of the contemporary cinema writing books of recent years. Aristotle was, above all, a philosopher exploring what it is that engages human emotions; this is precisely what Suber does with The Power of Film.